Originally published in The Nation's Longest Struggle: Looking Back
on the Modern Civil Rights Movement by the D.C. Everest school system
of Wisconsin. This interview was conducted and edited by Junior and Senior
High School students of the Everest system. For more information, see
D.C.
Everest Oral History Project.

[James W. Russell (RussellJ@easternct.edu) graduated from Tulsa, Will
Rogers High School and attended the University of Oklahoma in the 1960s. He
was active in the Tulsa civil rights movement and the first editor of
New Left Notes, the national newspaper of Students for a Democratic
Society. His most recent book is Escape from Texas: A Novel of Slavery
and the Texas War of Independence. He is working on a commemoration of
the 50th anniversary of the Tulsa sit-ins to be held in 2014. The following
interview was conducted by Jon Hefron and Dayton Dunbar, students in the
Civil Rights Oral History Project at D.C. Everest High School in Schofield,
Wisconsin.]

Interviewer: Would you tell us something about your background.

I was born in Bronxville, New York in 1944. When I was eleven years old
after the death of my father, my mother, sister, and I moved to Muskogee,
Oklahoma. Then a year later we moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. My mother was from
the south. In a way she picked up her children and returned home after the
death of her husband.

Oklahoma was part of the border south. Tulsa had been the site of the worst
race riot in U.S. history in 1921, which killed dozens to hundreds of
people. The true casualty figures are still not known.

When we arrived, Oklahoma was still very much a segregated state.
Restaurants, water fountains, restrooms, and many schools were segregated.
I remember my mother telling us to be very careful around it, that it
wasn't like the north, and that we should not challenge it.

Thank you. Next we would like you to tell us your story of what you
experienced in the Civil Rights Movement.

I first became involved in 1962, shortly after graduating from high school.
There was a youth committee of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) that was doing surveys of segregation in eating
establishments in Tulsa. We went around from restaurant to restaurant,
asking the owners whether they would serve a Negro (the word that was used
at the time). The responses ranged from very hostile to willingness, with
most being more like the former.

Later the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) entered the Tulsa black
community and challenged the NAACP's approach to desegregation. CORE was
much more militant and wanted to engage in sit-ins while the NAACP had a
more cautious approach.

In March 1964 I was coming back from a conference of Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) with striking coal miners in Hazard, Kentucky to
Norman, Oklahoma, where I was a student at the University of Oklahoma. I
saw a newspaper headline that sit-ins had broken out in Tulsa. I
immediately headed back to Tulsa and took part in the second sit-in at the
Apache Circle Restaurant. That was the first of two arrests for sit-ins in
eating establishments.

On July 2, 1964, the first Civil Rights Act was enacted. It, among other
provisions, outlawed segregation of restaurants. The charges against us for
the sit-ins were then dropped. Our sit-ins had come at tail end of the
restaurant desegregation movement. They, along with many actions elsewhere,
had helped to encourage passage of the Civil Rights Act as the final
debates over it were coming to a climax.

I spent that summer in Sand Springs, a suburb of Tulsa. My mother had just
moved there to be closer to her job. I noticed that its school system was
still completely segregated despite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education
Supreme Court decision which outlawed school segregation. There was an
ultra-modern white high school and a black school built in 1898 which
housed all grades from kindergarten to high school. Every day white
students would pass the black school to go to the white school.

I looked at that and thought that this should be our next project. I
brought it up at a CORE meeting and everyone agreed.

Wow, that is very interesting. What circumstances and events in your
past impacted your decision to get involved in the Civil Rights
Movement?

It is hard to pinpoint them. When I arrived in Oklahoma I absorbed some of
the prevailing attitudes on race as a result of peer group pressures in
junior and senior high school. Toward the end of high school in 1962 I
became very interested in politics. The Civil Rights Movement was already
going on at that time and I became very sympathetic with it.

How did you first get involved?

It was, as I stated, by joining the NAACP Youth Group and then moving from
that into CORE. Also when I went to college I became very active in
organizing a chapter of SDS, which in a lot of ways a northern arm of the
southern Civil Rights Movement. A lot of people who were in SDS were also
active in civil rights.

Did you ever question what you were doing? Did you ever have any doubts
of what you were doing?

Let me pick up the story at Sand Springs again because it links to the
substance of your question. After CORE gave us the go ahead, a committee of
three of us did a survey of the Sand Springs black community. We went door
to door asking people whether they were interested in integrating the
schools. Almost all the parents said yes. But black teachers were
understandably worried that they might lose their jobs. That led to
organizing a meeting of the whole black community to discuss the issues.

Seventy to eighty people, mainly parents, attended. We explained CORE's
proposal to pressure the Sand Springs School Board to integrate the schools
and then opened the meeting up for discussion. A young black man stood up
and spoke about how wonderful their school was and why it shouldn't be
integrated. A community member whispered to me that he had been sent by the
white school board to say that. At the end of his talk he said that the
school had a really famous graduate, Marques Haynes. Haynes was the star
dribbler of the Harlem Globetrotters, a 1940s and 50s black comedy
basketball team during the period when professional basketball was still
segregated. The Globetrotters actually defeated the NBA champions in s
special exhibition game.

At that point a man in the back said he wanted to speak. He came forward to
the front of the room and said, "I am Marques Haynes. It is true that I
graduated from the school and went on to a lot of success. But I never
wanted to be a basketball player. I wanted to be a printer. The white
school had a program in printing, but our school did not have a program in
printing."

So Marques Haynes then joined forces with us and completely swayed the
whole meeting to support the proposal because he had so much prestige. He
went with us to the school board, which refused the integration proposal.
We then filed a complaint with the Department of Justice and the
desegregation of the Sand Springs schools began that year.

Getting back to your question about having second thoughts about what I was
doing, all of the controversial public exposure brought a lot of heat onto
my household. For one thing I was fired from a summer steel mill job. But
that was the least of our problems. There were a lot of threatening phone
calls to the house. My mother was eventually driven out of town and had to
move back to Tulsa. At the end of the summer I returned to college, leaving
my widowed mother to face all the problems that I had caused. She took some
of the consequences for what I had started. I had some mixed feelings about
that, but not enough to have abandoned the Civil Rights Movement.

What was your methodology and philosophy of the movement that what you
were a part of?

Nonviolence as espoused by Martin Luther King was at that time embraced by
most people in the movement. He had been influenced not only by Gandhi in
India but also the pacifist movement in the United States. At that point I
was a sponge, reading everything I could, including the pacifist magazine,
Liberation and the essays and novels of James Baldwin.

Who are some of the people that were always be your side and supported
you and what you were doing?

There were people that I knew through CORE in Oklahoma and the national
connections I had with SDS.

Now you said that you were very involved with CORE. Could you tell about
some of the leaders that you associated yourself with? Tell me about their
personalities and why they were ineffective or effective as leaders.

Most of our involvement was local through the CORE chapter. It is true that
in 1964 I and others went to the CORE national convention in Kansas City. I
heard national leaders such as James Farmer speak. But that was really on
the side. Everything was on the local level. I don't think that there was a
dynamic local leader like that. Rather, we were just swept up by the times,
because the Civil Rights Movement was going on and had very much captured
national and international attention.

Here is a footnote that you may not know that I think is very important.
You always hear that the first lunch counter sit-ins were in Greensboro,
North Carolina in 1960. That is not true. The first ones were in Oklahoma
City in 1956. They were led by a woman named Clara Luper, who just died
this year, 2012. You can look up her obituary in the New York Times. Even
though Oklahoma wasn't the Deep South, it definitely had its own kind of
indigenous set of struggles around racial issues. Clara Luper came up from
Oklahoma City with a number of her followers to participate in and perhaps
help to instigate the first Tulsa sit-in on March 30, 1964.

Were you ever harassed by people you knew or didn't know?

Absolutely. There were the threatening phone calls I mentioned. It was just
a very different time. In 2012 racism still very much exists, but few
people will publicly admit being racist. Back then people openly admitted
it and would argue with anyone who thought differently. If they heard if
anyone was one of "those Civil Rights people," they would get very angry.

It was very common for people to throw anticommunist stuff at us, such as
yelling, "Go back to Russia." It was a very weird combining of those
issues, as if to say that only communists supported civil rights, which was
not at all true.

Now how did you feel at that time about the President and his actions
with regards to the Civil Rights?

There was a notion that Civil Rights was being embraced at a national level
at the beginning of the Johnson administration. His name was sometimes
invoked in opposition to local segregationist politicians. But the attitude
of civil rights activists turned more critical toward him during the 1964
Democratic Party convention. The party refused to recognize the integrated
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (FDP) as representing the state rather
than the all white official party. Johnson was clearly behind the scenes
lining up the votes against recognition of the FDP for political reasons.

That was a great moral issue for all of us. Mississippi was where the worst
violence against blacks and civil rights activists was occurring. The
northern Democratic Party had been in an unholy alliance with the southern
segregationist Democratic Party since the Civil War. All that has changed
since then.

I know that the movements that you were in were successful at least in
the schools. What were the benefits for blacks and society in general?

There is still enormous racial inequality in this country. There is no way
that the Civil Rights Movement solved all those issues. But now and then
are very different historical periods. There definitely has been some
advances in the level of discourse. There is a notion that there should be
racial equality in the country.

There have been some unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Movement.
In the case of Tulsa, the success of the Civil Rights Movement let the
black middle class move out of black areas, leaving a social vacuum. I have
heard blacks make the argument that in Tulsa the black schools declined for
a while because of integration. During segregation black professionals had
to take jobs as teachers because they couldn't get them elsewhere. The
segregated black schools thus had some excellent teachers. But when other
opportunities opened up, these school teachers started to leave and the
quality of the schools deteriorated. I don't want to push that point too
strongly, just to say that it was an unintended consequence. There are
definitely many more opportunities for blacks today because of integration
than there where at that time.

Did women play a role in the movements that you where apart of?

Definitely. Half or more of the civil rights activists in Tulsa where
women. A number had informal and formal leadership roles.

Did you experience the split in the Civil Rights Movement around
1966?

If you mean the emergence of the Black Power movement, yes. By 1966 I was
more involved with the movement against the War in Vietnam through SDS. All
of us were watching the Black Power development because it came out of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which SDS was close to,
with Stokely Carmichael as its initiator. There were a number of whites
still involved in SNCC at that time and they ended up leaving because of
the Black Power Movement. It was an issue of the need for black self
determination that conflicted with the well meaning participation of
educated whites from the North in those organizations. I think that it was
understood that it was not a hostile situation between whites and blacks in
SNCC but rather the need for self determination.

What does Black Power mean to you?

It came out of a very historical context of the civil rights and black
movement centering on the need for self determination. At the time I saw it
positively. It was logical that after hundreds of years of being exploited
and oppressed by slavery and racism blacks needed to come together as a
people and not have that diluted by the presence of others, no matter of
well intentioned. I do think at some points it could go off in not so good
directions, but the general thrust of it I saw as positive.

How did the assassination of Martin Luther King impact the movements you
were involved in?

The King assassination was the final straw for many people. It created a
sense of desperation. The ghettos exploded in rioting. There was a week in
1968 when there were more American troops deployed in black neighborhoods
than in Vietnam.

A lot of people will say that the riots were destructive and accomplished
nothing positive as opposed to the nonviolent tactics of the earlier Civil
Rights Movement. While not condoning them, the riots may have added a
significant push to expanding welfare reforms such as anti-poverty programs
in this country. The riots scared a lot of people in the white
establishment who were then more willing to make concessions.

Now I know that you talked about this before but do you think there is
still segregation here today?

Definitely. I now live in Connecticut which is still a very segregated
state in many respects. During the 1960s we made a distinction between de
facto and de jure segregation. Connecticut is an example of the former. Its
schools and neighborhoods remain substantially segregated in de facto
terms. It capital city, Hartford, for example, is mainly Black and Hispanic
and surrounded by some of the wealthiest suburbs in the United States which
are mainly white.

How did your life change because of your experiences?

Those where really wonderful times in a lot of ways. I was 18, 19, and 20
years old and those are times when you go through your own internal changes
in thinking. Everybody does because you are leaving your family. You are
trying to figure out what is going on in the world and where you stand. To
have come of age during the Civil Rights and antiwar movements was very
significant to who I became. I continue to carry a lot of those formative
experiences with me.

What advice would you give our generation on racial relations?

First, don't assume that the racial problems of the United States were
solved by the Civil Rights Movement. There remain enormous problems of
inequality. The Civil Rights Movement ended de jure segregation. De facto
segregation remains. The next step of the movement was supposed to be
achieving economic equality. In many respects the war in Vietnam disrupted
that progression by diverting to focus of our energies. True racial
equality still not been accomplished.

Second, get involved with issues of social justice, even if it puts you in
a minority position. Today's minority can be tomorrow's majority if you're
successful. Your state, Wisconsin, is at the center of a national struggle
over the rights of working people. You have a lot of opportunities to get
involved in it as well as the Occupy Wall Street movement nationally.